Читать книгу When the World Outlawed War - David Swanson - Страница 5

Following the war, many in the United States, disillusioned with the war’s promises, came to distrust European peace efforts, since European entanglements had created the war. When the Treaty of Versailles, on June 28, 1919, imposed a cruel victors’ justice on Germany, Wilson was seen as having betrayed his word and the armistice agreement. When Wilson promised that the League of Nations would right all the wrongs of that treaty, many were skeptical, particularly as the League bore some resemblance to the sort of alliances that had produced the World War in the first place.

Both jingoistic isolationists and internationalist peace activists with a vision of Outlawry that shunned the use of force even to punish war rejected the League, as did the United States Senate, dealing a major blow to those peace advocates who believed the League was not only advantageous but also the reward due after so much suffering in the war. Efforts to bring the United States in as a member of the World Court failed as well. A Naval Disarmament Conference in Washington in 1921-1922 did perhaps more harm than good. And in 1923 and 1924 respectively, the members of the League of Nations in Europe failed to ratify a Draft Pact for Mutual Assistance and an agreement called the Geneva Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, both of which had adopted some of the language of the U.S. Outlawry movement to somewhat different purposes.

Remarkably, these set-backs did not halt the momentum of the peace movement in the United States or around the world. The institutional funding and structure of the peace movement was enough to make any early twenty-first century peace activist drool with envy, as was the openness of the mass media of the day, namely newspapers, to promoting peace. Leading intellectuals, politicians, robber barons, and other public figures poured their resources into the cause. A defeat or two, or 10, might discourage some individuals, but it was not about to derail the movement. Neither was political partisanship, as peace groups pressured Democrats and Republicans alike, and both responded. It was during the relatively peaceful Republican interlude of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, in between the extreme Democratic war making of Wilson and Roosevelt, that the peace movement reached its height.

After the turn of century, the World Peace Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace had been created, adding energy to existing peace societies in the United States and developing a new concept: pacifism. Andrew Carnegie sought to “hasten the abolition of international war, the foulest blot upon our civilization.” In 1913 he funded a Peace Palace at The Hague as a home for the Permanent Court of Arbitration, a court of which the United States was and still is a member, but a court that provided dispute resolution services as opposed to ruling on the violation of laws.

Early in the 20th century Congressman Richard Barthold proposed a Union of Nations with decisions not to be enforced militarily. In 1910, the World Peace Foundation opposed the whole system of war. Anna Eckstein promoted a petition for a proposal at the Third Hague Conference to pledge the use of only peaceful means, to be enforced by economic boycott and a court of arbitration. The idea that you could not end war by lining up allies who would punish an aggressor through the use of . . . war was American wisdom, less shared in Europe.

Yet, in 1910 Theodore Roosevelt in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech spoke for those who thought war should indeed be used to enforce peace. Roosevelt himself, of course, used the U.S. military for far different purposes, but his Nobel speech exemplified the thinking that would later support the League of Nations, and later still the United Nations:

[I]t would be a masterstroke if those great powers honestly bent on peace would form a League of Peace, not only to keep the peace among themselves, but to prevent, by force if necessary, its being broken by others.

Then, in 1914, war came to Europe, and U.S. peace groups opposed it. A new National Peace Federation was created. Jane Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt created the Woman’s Peace Party. A 1915 convention in Philadelphia created a League to Enforce Peace. Henry Ford chartered a ship and took peace delegates to Europe, President Wilson having rejected Ford’s offer to include official government delegates.

Wilson was reelected in 1916 on peace slogans, including “He kept us out of war.” Wilson admitted in 1916 that “force will not accomplish anything that is permanent,” but in 1917 he demanded “force to the utmost, force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant force that shall make right the law of the world.” Such is the fate of campaign promises. But that language (“make right the law of the world”) would come back to bite the forces of militarism, just as Wilson’s democratic rhetoric was turned against him on the banners of the suffragettes protesting at the White House, enduring abuse and prison, and going on hunger strikes until women obtained the right to vote.

As Wilson talked up peace as the official reason for going to war, countless souls took him extremely seriously. “It is no exaggeration to say that where there had been relatively few peace schemes before the World War,” writes Ferrell, “there now were hundreds and even thousands” in Europe and the United States. The decade following the war was a decade of searching for peace: “Peace echoed through so many sermons, speeches, and state papers that it drove itself into the consciousness of everyone. Never in world history was peace so great a desideratum, so much talked about, looked toward, and planned for, as in the decade after the 1918 Armistice.”

This was the case in Europe perhaps even more than in the United States. European trade unions were pacifist and were working to recover the prewar idea of a general strike to prevent any movement towards war. Many political parties in Europe were strongly in favor of working to ensure peace. European peace organizations themselves were smaller and less influential than their U.S. counterparts, but they were more unified in their agenda. They favored both disarmament and the League of Nations, as well as other treaties, alliances, and arbitration agreements.

In a September 1928 article in the American Review of Reviews Frank Simonds described how U.S. and European peace advocates had approached the problem from opposite directions. Americans viewed peace as the norm and as consisting of the absence of war, he wrote. But Europeans, dealing with constant threats, provocations, grievances, and divisions, believed peace to require an elaborate system of checks on hostilities and means of resolving disputes. The United States imagined the world at peace and sought to preserve it. Europeans strove to build a peace they did not know, with a keen awareness that they could never possibly solve every dispute to everyone’s satisfaction.

Many U.S. peace groups, it should be said however, inclined toward the European perspective, while others did not. The United States had a larger peace movement than Europe did, but a more deeply divided one. Sincere advocates of peace came down on both sides of the questions of joining the League of Nations and the World Court. Nor did they all see eye to eye on disarmament. If something could be found that would unite the entire U.S. peace movement, the U.S. government of the day was sufficiently representative of the public will that whatever that measure was, it was bound to be enacted.

The Carnegie Endowment had profited from the war through U.S. Steel Corporation bonds. The Endowment’s president, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, and its director of the Division of Economics and History, Professor James Thomson Shotwell, would play significant roles in the creation of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, after having advocated unsuccessfully for U.S. membership in the League of Nations. Shotwell had a $600,000 annual budget, or about $6.8 million in today’s terms. The World Peace Foundation, a U.S. organization, had a $1 million endowment (or $11.3 million in today’s terms) and, like the Carnegie Endowment, supported the League and the Court. Other major groups included the Foreign Policy Association, the League of Nations Non-Partisan Association, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Church Peace Union and the World Alliance for International Friendship, as well as the Federal Council of Churches of Christ and its Commission on International Justice and Goodwill.

Another U.S. group, the American Foundation, administered the Bok Peace Plan Award, which in 1922 offered $100,000 for a winning five thousand-word peace plan. Among 22,165 plans submitted was one from William Jennings Bryan (who had resigned as Secretary of State when President Wilson had lied about the contents of the Lusitania in order to build up war support) and one from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, although the winner was Charles H. Levermore.

More radical peace groups, often with less funding, in some cases supported the League and the Court, but they pushed for disarmament and opposed militarism, including U.S. imperialism in Central and South America, more consistently. Ferrell described the growth of this movement:

After the 1918 Armistice scores of new peace groups mushroomed into existence. The usual procedure was first to choose an impressive name and to select appropriate stationery (ordinarily a propagandistic, name-studded letterhead). There then began a frenzied round of fund-raising, conventioning, writing to congressmen. It was truly remarkable the amount of activity these crusading peace groups could generate.

Among these organizations were the American Friends Service Committee (100,000 members), American Goodwill Association (5,000), American School Citizenship League, Arbitration Crusade, Association for Peace Education, Association to Abolish War (400), Catholic Association for International Peace, Committee on Militarism in Education, Corda Fratres Association of Cosmopolitan Clubs (1,000), Fellowship for a Christian Social Order (2,500), Fellowship of Reconciliation (4,500), Fellowship of Youth for Peace, Friends General Conference (20,000), Intercollegiate Peace Association, National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War, National Council for Prevention of War, Parliament of Peace and Universal Brotherhood, Peace Association of Friends in America (90,000), Peace Heroes Memorial Society, School World Friendship League, Society to Eliminate Economic Causes of War (150), War Resisters League (400), War Resisters International (United States Committee), Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (6,000), Women’s Peace Society (2,000), Women’s Peace Union of the Western Hemisphere, World Peace Association, and World Peace Mission (58), and many others.

As the names of the groups above suggest, in the 1920s women, now with the right to vote, were a major part of the antiwar movement. The American branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom distributed stickers to place on income tax forms reading “That part of this income tax which is levied for preparation for War is paid only under Protest and Duress.” A split in the women’s peace movement led Carrie Chapman Catt to establish the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War, which would be instrumental in pressuring senators when it came time for ratification of the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

The National Council for Prevention of War, according to Ferrell, “during the twenties laid down a barrage of peace propaganda the like of which has seldom been seen in the United States.” With a budget of $113,000 in 1927 it sent out 430,000 pieces of literature. No one had thought to invent email yet, so “literature” meant hard copy pamphlets, and they tended to be read rather than deleted or sent into a spam folder.